New rules curtailing the use of racial profiling won’t apply to border agents, who will still be allowed to consider race and ethnicity when stopping people at airports, international crossings and immigration checkpoints.

“A single, uncorroborated source of information—including a Facebook or Twitter post”—is enough to put innocent foreigners and Americans on a watchlist of “known” and “suspected” terrorists shared with foreign and domestic agencies as well as private contractors, ACLU legislative counsel Arjun Sethi writes at The Guardian on Saturday.

Welcome to a new era of American policing, where cops increasingly see themselves as soldiers occupying enemy territory, often with the help of Uncle Sam’s armory, and where even nonviolent crimes are met with overwhelming force and brutality.

Shena Gutierrez was already cuffed and in an inspection room in Nogales, Ariz., when the Customs and Border Protection agent grabbed her purse, opened it, dumped its contents onto the floor, and began to trample on her life, quite literally, with his black boots.

A spreadsheet leaked by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden enabled Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept to reveal the identities of five prominent Muslim Americans who were spied on by the National Security Agency, chiefly, it appears, for their political work and religious affiliation. Greenwald comments in an interview with “Democracy Now!”

The Bill of Rights was designed to protect the people from their government. If the First Amendment’s right to speak out publicly was the people’s wall of security, then the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy was its buttress. It was once thought that the government should neither be able to stop citizens from speaking nor peer into their lives.

An Associated Press article in February confirmed a purchase order by the Department of Homeland Security for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. That’s enough to sustain an Iraq-sized war for over twenty years. Someone in government seems to expect some serious civil unrest. Why?

MSNBC host Chris Hayes explained on his program Thursday how the Bush administration—and specifically the former vice president’s son-in-law—played a critical role in defeating regulations that would have strengthened federal oversight of chemical plants like the one that exploded and killed 15 people in West, Texas, last week.

The Department of Homeland Security monitors fertilizer plants with at least 400 pounds of potentially explosive ammonium nitrate. But apparently, it wasn’t even aware that the West, Texas, plant that exploded Wednesday, killing at least 14 people and obliterating a small town in the process, even existed.

The Department of Homeland Security wants to study the benefits of collecting a fee from anyone who enters or leaves the country at landed border crossings, as opposed to funding operations by collecting taxes from earners who can afford to pay.

The U.S. Border Patrol has caught some border crossers in remote stretches of desert with a sophisticated sensor mounted on unmanned spy aircraft that can reveal every man, woman and child under its gaze from a height of about 25,000 feet.

Since 2003, the Department of Homeland Security has grown into a miniature Pentagon. But unlike the Pentagon, it draws no attention whatsoever—even though this country has spent an amount of money equivalent to more than one and a half New Deals on “homeland security” since 9/11.

Unlike on our southern border, there is still no wall to our north on what was once dubbed the “longest undefended border in the world.” But don’t let that fool you. The U.S.-Canadian border is increasingly a national security hotspot watched over by drones, surveillance towers and agents of the Department of Homeland Security.

The Department of Homeland Security has emerged as an unlikely advocate for gay rights. The agency will now consider long-term same-sex couples as being in a “family relationship” for immigration purposes.

In as little as one year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will have a mobile, long-range, laser-based molecular scanner that can identify any chemical substance in or on your body—including gunpowder, flecks of cocaine on your sleeve and the half-digested Pop-Tart in your gut.

A government manual obtained by a privacy watchdog group reveals that the Department of Homeland Security has compiled a list of hundreds of key words used to detect possible terrorist and other threats on social media sites.

Did Naomi Wolf get her facts straight in her Guardian report about American mayors acting in cahoots with the Department of Homeland Security in their recent crackdowns on OWS encampments, or did she engage in a little journalistic extrapolation? Those aren’t the only two options here, but at least one noteworthy ... (more)

Now that some of the mob giddiness that followed the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death has dissipated, fear is once again thick in the air as U.S. officials warn state and local law enforcement agencies of possible retaliation attacks by a vengeful al-Qaida.

One sinister li’l tidbit from former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s upcoming tell-all won’t do much to change the Bush administration’s reputation for string-pulling on as many governmental fronts as possible: According to teasers released by his publisher, Ridge was pushed by Bush & Co. to raise the terrorist threat level on the eve of W.’s second electoral victory in 2004.

If you thought reality TV was only for wannabe warblers, petulant teens and bug-eating fetishists, guess again. The Department of Homeland Security, “as well as several other government agencies,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, is working with ABC on a new “unscripted” show called “Border Security USA,” brought to you, creepily enough, by the executive producer of “Big Brother.”